1. What is happiness?
"Happiness (eudaimonia) is an activity of the soul in accordance with perfect virtue (arete)." (I.13)

2. Mean concerned with passion and action:
"...for it is [moral virtue] that is concerned with passions and actions, and in these there is excess, defect and the intermediate (meson). For instance, both fear and confidence and appetite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in both cases not well; but to feel them at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue. Similarly, with regard to actions, there is also excess, defect and the intermediate." (II.6)

3. Mean not arithmetical:
"In everything that is continuous and divisible it is possible to take more, less, or an equal amount, and that either in terms of the thing itself or relatively to us; and the equal is an intermediate (meson) between excess and defect. By the intermediate in the object I mean that which is equidistant from each of the extremes, which is one and the same for all men; by the intermediate relative to us that which is neither too much nor too little -- and this is not one, nor the same for all. For instance, if ten is many and two is few, six is the intermediate, taken in terms of the object; for it exceeds and is exceeded by an equal amount; this is intermediate according to arithmetical proportion. But the intermediate relatively to us is not to be taken so; if ten pounds are too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds; for this also is perhaps too much for the person who is to take it, or too little -- too little for Milo, too much for the beginner in athletic exercises." (II.6)

4. Accuracy in Ethics:
"We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premises to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and, in speaking about things which are only for the most part true, and with premises of the same kind, to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs." (I.3)

5. What does the doctrine maintain?
I. Emotion is quantifiable.
II. There is a corresponding emotion for every specific excellence of character.
III. One can be disposed to exhibit every emotion to excess, to defect, or in the right amount.
IV. There is no emotion that cannot be exhibited in the right amount.
V. Qualifications such as "in the right way," "for the right reason," or "with reference to the right objects" should be understood as expressing mean emotions; that is, whether an action is excellent is primarily a factor of emotion.

6. Doing an action for the wrong reason:
"Might we rather consider how one does something for the wrong reason, and find all sorts of ways to go quantitatively wrong? In doing an action for the wrong reason, one might be insufficiently concerned with the noble, too concerned for pleasure, too eager to avoid effort, too little attentive to certain people's interests, too stubborn, and so on. The relevant continua need to be found contextually; it seems likely that acting for the right reasons might involve avoidance of excess and defect in quantities of various sorts." (Welton & Polansky, 91)

7. Method in Ethics:
"We must, however, not only make this general statement, but also apply it to the individual facts. For among statements about conduct, those which are more general apply more widely, but those which are particular are more true, since conduct has to do with individual cases, and our statements must harmonize with the facts in these cases" (II.7)

8. Some of Aristotle's states of character:

Emotions	States of	Character
concerning	excess	mean	defect

9. Courage:
"With regard to feelings of fear and confidence courage is the mean; of the people who exceed, he who exceeds in fearlessness has no name (many of the states have no name), while the man who exceeds in confidence is rash, and he who exceeds in fear and falls short in confidence is a coward." (II.7)

10. Continence and Virtue:
"...both the continent man and the temperate man are such as to do nothing contrary to the rule for the sake of the bodily pleasures, but the former has and the latter has not bad appetites, and the latter is such as not to feel pleasure contrary to the rule, while the former is such as to feel pleasure but not to be led by it." (VII.9)

11. Education:
"But we must consider the things towards which we ourselves also are easily carried away; for some of us tend to one thing; some to another; and this will be recognizable from the pleasure and the pain we feel. We must drag ourselves away to the contrary extreme; for we shall get into the intermediate state by drawing well away from error, as people do in straightening sticks that are bent." (II.9)

Works Cited

W. Hardie, "Virtue is a Mean" in Aristotle's Ethical Theory (Oxford, 1986)

Mark McCullagh, "Mediality and Rationality in Aristotle's Account of Excellence of Character," in Aristotle, Virtue and the Mean, eds R.Bosley et al (Edmonton, 1995)

W. D. Ross, Aristotle (Methuen, 1930), 187-235

J. O. Urmson, "Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean" in Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, ed A. Rorty (Berkeley, 1980)

William Welton and Ronald Polansky, "The Viability of Virtue in the Mean," in Aristotle, Virtue and the Mean

STRAIGHTENING BENT STICKS:

ARISTOTLE'S DOCTRINE OF THE MEAN (DOM)

Nigel Nicholson 12/2/98

When you look around a modern western university, it is the marks of Aristotle, not of Plato, that are everywhere evident. The curriculum is divided into subjects that respect the disciplinary categories laid out by Aristotle's different works. Where we have a division of literature and language, Aristotle has works on poetics and rhetoric; the natural sciences are represented by Aristotle's works on physics, astronomy and biology; the social sciences by his Politics, parts of his Ethics, and the multivolume work detailing various constitutions, of which only fragments remain. To look through an index of Aristotle's many works is to see set out the disciplinary specialities of modern learning.

Aristotle was thus of enormous influence, and the Ethics was one of his three or four most influential works; and within the Ethics, the DOM is one of its three or four most significant ideas. But the doctrine has met with a very mixed reception in this century. Critics have complained that the theory is vacuous and truistic, that is, that it does not even make a substantive claim, let alone a substantive claim that is correct. This criticism comes in two forms, the first claiming that the DOM merely says that one should not do anything too much, the other that it merely defines virtue as what a wise person would define it. But there is a second type of criticism that is more interesting: many critics have felt that the DOM fails to grasp what is moral in moral reflection, that it does not capture the essence of morality. In the first part of my lecture I will explain the theory and show that it does make substantive and interesting claims; and in the second part I will consider the merits of these claims through an examination of the individual virtues. I hope to show that, although it may seem to us to miss certain facts about morality, it offers an excellent vehicle for examining the larger question of what is important to our idea of morality and what sort of shape an ethics should or can take.

(A) Explication of DOM

Ar sums up the DOM at II.6 [header]. We need to look at these terms one by one, but first we need to establish why Ar is interested in virtue.

(A1) In bk. I, Ar argues that [no.1] "happiness (or eudaimonia) is an activity of the soul in accordance with perfect virtue (arete)." Consequently at the end of bk I he concludes that "we must consider the nature of virtue" (I.13). Perfect virtue logically produces happiness, because happiness is the fulfilment of a man's function and virtue is "the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well" (II.6). Thus the point in examining virtue is that if we find it we shall "see better the nature of happiness" (I.13).

(A2) Back to the definition of II.6. What is a character state concerned with choice? It is through choice that, for Ar, virtue is particularly revealed, so he is interested particularly in the dispositional grounding of those choices, which is character. We can think of a state of character concerned with choice, or a prohairetic state of character, as what determines not only choices, but also emotions and actions as well, how often you do things, how angry you get. It may help to think of this state as a descriptive mechanism that explains why we react in certain predictable patterns. To describe a character is thus to offer a conditional sentence concerning how someone will react in a given situation: "If x happens, you will get angry in y way."[1]

(A3) What does "in a mean relative to us" mean? What does it mean for a character state to be in a mean? For Ar, it means that one's desires and actions are in a mean [no.2]. It is clear enough from this how desires are to be thought of as capable of being in a mean; as far as action is concerned, we must assume that a mean action is one that reflects the actions of someone whose emotions are in a mean. One can have non-medial emotions, but act in a medial way. An example would be the person who wants to play another video game, but returns to the library. These mean emotions and desires are the result of a mean character state, and define what a mean character state is.

(A4) Various problems can be raised with the idea of the mean; most focus on the question of how we are to understand the idea that an emotion can be in a mean? How concrete is the sense of mean?

(A4.1) One thing the mean is not is a synonym for moderation; the DOM does not say that we should always be basically pretty nice to everyone. It would be absurd to imagine that Ar is contending that our emotional responses should always be moderate. As Urmson points out, different situations obviously require different reactions. "If you are trivially rude to me, should I be moderately angry with you? [And should I be moderately angry with you] also when you torture my wife? To be moderately angry would be absurd on both occasions" (160-61). Unless we are to assume that Aristotle's professed concern for the context of actions is superficial, the DOM cannot be a doctrine of moderation.

(A4.2) If being in a mean does not mean being moderate, then in what sense is emotion in a mean? Ar makes it very clear that the mean is not a mathematically determined quantity; that is, that one does not obtain figures for the extremes and then average them out. The mean, he says, is a mean relative to us, not to the object. This is explained in II.6 [no.3]. Milo was a legendary wrestler who, so the story went, consumed a whole ox in one day. On that diet, ten pounds of food would seem rather insubstantial. At any rate, Ar clearly denies that his mean is to be calculated arithmetically, by dividing the distance between the extremes (even if we could obtain figures for these). This fits with his frequent assertion that accuracy in ethics is of a very different sort to accuracy in mathematics, and can only be attained in proportion to the exactitude of the material it concerns: [no.4].

(A4.3) But the question still remains, in what sense is a mean emotion in a mean? As various senses drop out of contention, the idea that this theory is truistic gains ground. The DOM seems merely to say that a virtuous man will feel neither too much nor too little emotion, a wordy version of the well-worn Delphic maxim, "Nothing to excess." Excess means vice: of course excessive emotion is a mark of vice, and of course one should do nothing to excess. Hence, the DOM as represented here is obviously a truism.

But there is much more going on this theory. Far from being a truism, it is, I think, quite bold. It implies [no.6]:

I. That emotion (and indeed action and virtue) can be quantified, that each represents a disivible continuum, like food. Emotion is measurable like food, and there can be more or less of it. To see what this claim involves, you might consider what things do not belong on a sliding scale -- perhaps life, savoir faire, or for Socrates knowledge -- you either have it or you do not; for Soc, half knowledge is not possible.

II. That corresponding to every excellence of character there is specific emotion. That is, excellence of character has to be understood as primarily concerning emotion.

III. That every emotion, because it can be plotted on a scale, can be exhibited to excess, to defect, or in the right amount. This implies also:

IV. That there is no emotion that cannot be exhibited correctly; or inversely, that every emotion can be exhibited in the right amount. This final claim leads to Ar's radical reorganization of the words we use for virtues and vices in II.6. Some emotions seem to be characterized as purely bad, but Ar argues that these bad emotions are better understood as the excessive or defective expressions of some more basic and inclusive emotion. Thus envy and spite are always bad, but our language hides their relationship to each other and to a virtue (righteous indignation). It is worth underlining how striking claim (IV) is, that every emotion can be expressed well. You might consider the Christian response to injury of turning the other cheek; Aristotle's virtuous man will get angry.

We have thus seen that Ar's thesis offers a more basic pattern to our emotional responses than that offered by everyday language. It joins character states in triads, asserting that they are fundamentally related by the emotion involved in them, and asserting that one can only occupy one of the three states. The scheme can thus be thought of as one that tries to clarify our understanding of our emotional responses.

(A4.4) A second objection that is made to the use of the concept of the mean in the DOM helps us see another aspect in which the DOM makes a substantive claim. Many of the conditions Ar offers us for right action in fact look nothing like things that can be quantified and located on a scale. [Look back at no.2, "For instance... characteristic of virtue."] It has been argued that the DOM cannot help with understanding whether we do something for the right reason or with reference to the right objects, since the right reason cannot involve "too few or too many reasons," nor can right objects be centrally defined by how many of them there are (Hursthouse 1981). But as Welton and Polansky argue, such understandings of these criteria are far too narrow: [no.7]. On this reading Ar's use of the mean appears both stronger and more significant, and we can add a fifth principle to the four that we have traced in the DOM so far [no.6]:

V. Qualifications such as "in the right way," "for the right reason," or "with reference to the right objects" should be understood as expressing mean emotions; that is, whether an action is excellent is primarily a factor of emotion.

However, while we can accept that Ar's DOM can be defended in this way, we should also consider the cost of this defence. Is this a better way to think about virtuous and vicious actions than more specific action-based accounts? Is it more helpful to think of the person who does something for the wrong reason as simply having the wrong reason, or as motivated by an excess or defect of emotion? Would it be a clearer way of pointing this out to him to say that "x is a bad reason, y would be a good one," or "you had an excess of x emotion and need to temper that."

(A5) We will return to this question, but for now, we must finish examining the statement of the DOM. The final part of this statement qualifies the mean as something "determined by a rational principle (logos), and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it." Some critics have fastened on this phrase to argue again that the DOM is vacuous because it passes the buck: virtue, Ar tells us, is what someone who is wise in a certain way defines it as. On this reading, Ar only begins to help us discover virtue when he turns to the question of what this special sort of wisdom consists in, in VI; and the DOM is itself useless. This reading accords the man of practical wisdom a significant role, which I believe is correct, but which needs to be seen in the context of what the DOM is actually trying to do. In the conclusion of this lecture I will spell out what I think the purpose of the DOM is and who this wise man is, but for the time being it can suffice to note that Ar does not in fact say that "virtue is what someone who is wise in a certain way defines it as," but that [no.1]. The man of practical wisdom is constrained to locate virtue in the mean state of various character continua; and this is, I believe, precisely what Ar is trying to justify here, not any specific propositions about whether given acts are virtuous or vicious.

(B) Examination of examples

We have now set out what the DOM involves, and shown that it is not just truisms. But we cannot stop here; Ar himself says that it is not adequate to state a general theory about ethics without testing its application to specific instances: [no.7]. This reveals an important fact of Ar's method in his ethics. Just as the Socratic dialogue , Ar's Ethics draws its moral foundation from commonly held beliefs, and so must be tested against them to see if they are in accord; his "statements must harmonize with the facts in these cases." The proof of Ar's system lies in its ability to explain, organize and accommodate those commonly held beliefs. It is thus rather different to the Republic, where virtue is defined relative to an independent criterion, the good functioning of the city, and thus implies a radical reorganization of what we see as good. Ar's virtues are intended to look much like what an Athenian of the 4thC would think of as virtue. His Ethics does not rebuild ethics from the ground up, but tinkers with and seeks to give rational order to a system already in place. Now the details:

(B1) Let's take temperance first, as this seems to work the best. Ar defines the emotion to which this excellence corresponds as pleasures and pains, not any pleasures and pains, but specifically those of touch. This seems a little odd (we might want to include all bodily senses), but hearing, smell and sight were not thought by the Greeks to be things that required the specific virtue of temperance, and Ar further explains that that the pleasures of taste, which were especially the province of temperance, are really pleasures of touch. He quotes a famous gourmand as praying that his neck might be as long as a crane's...

In line with his theory, Ar explains that one can take too much pleasure in touching, and one is called self-indulgent, and too little pleasure, and one is called...? In fact, the Greeks have no name for this character, because he is so rare; but he nevertheless exists and Ar calls him insensible. Further Ar makes it clear that to desire the wrong objects is an excess of desire for pleasures of the touch, suggesting that Welton and Polansky's reading of Ar's theory is at least a correct representation of his meaning.

The analysis of temperance thus works well. A specific emotion is selected, its extremes described, and the virtue shown to be between them. Again note that this is not an obvious idea of virtue: it would seem unlikely, for example, that virginity would be a virtue, i.e. that the particular circumstances of a whole life would call for total sexual abstinence.

(B2) Other triads have problems, however. Take courage, . Ar gives an outline of his explanation of courage in II.7, and then discusses it in detail in III.6-9. [no.9] is the summary from II.7. Courage is the mean, rashness and excessive fearlessness are the excesses, and cowardice is the defect.

According to the DOM, there should be an emotion that corresponds to the virtue of courage, but what is this emotion? In III.6, Ar's answer seems to be fear. How then would this work? Is the courageous man fearless? If so, in what sense? We use fearless in two senses, one meaning literally having no fear, the other, the more common, meaning acting as if one had no fear. So, is the courageous man without fear, or does he have some fear, but not too much, and acts as if he had none at all?

Asking these questions opens out an important fact about Ar's idea of virtue. It has been suggested that we, as heirs to the Christian tradition, think of the courageous man, not as having no fear, but as fearful and not acting on his fear. The virtue is not a question of feeling the right amount of fear, but of controlling whatever fear we have. In fact, the more fear we control, the more virtuous we can be.

Prof. Reeve often gives an example about spiders. Imagine someone who is scared of house spiders, and someone else who is not scared of tarantulas. Prof. Reeve argues that, for Aristotle, what goes wrong in the coward, the one scared by little spiders, is that he overestimates the danger of the little spider, while the rash person underestimates the danger of the tarantula, which he proceeds to pet. As we saw with Welton and Polansky, for Aristotle this over- or underestimation is a defect of emotion, rather than, say, eyesight. A coward just sees things as scarier than they are. But is this really what we think of as a coward? One might argue rather the opposite, that in a given situation, what marks out the brave man from the coward is that he is more prepared to face what both agree to be scary. A normal person is hardly brave for sweeping a spider out of their home, but an arachnophobe surely would be.

This idea of virtue formed the central prop of W.D.Ross' critique of Ar's Ethics. He argued that virtue is better thought of as the control of desires, rather than as feeling desires in the right way. Courage for Ross was thus control of fear, and Ar's account of courage was fundamentally wrong because it focused only on the feeling of the emotion.

We may agree with Ross, but we cannot attribute this idea to Ar. His comments on fear do indeed go both ways (sometimes he seems to allow that the courageous man is afraid, and sometimes he declares that he is unperturbed), but in general Ar insists that real virtue does not consist in the controlling of bad emotions and desires (what Ar called enkracy, and what we often call continence), but in having good and proper emotions: [no.10; what you should notice here is that the temperate man is not continent]. In Hardie's opinion, this distinction between real virtue and continence is one of Ar's great contributions to moral philosophy. "If it has become a platitude, he comments, this is what happens to many discoveries in philosophy."

Given this distinction, we may prefer to translate arete by something other than virtue. This term may suggest too much the sort of idea that Ross outlines involving temptation and the resistance of bad desires. Many translate arete as excellence; with this translation it is easy to see how Ar could think the continent man does not have arete; he is, after all, less than excellent (if still superior to most). But, as we decide on a translation, we should keep in view the larger issue that makes a new word possibibly preferable: Ar does not seem to locate virtue in the same place that we do, and his notion of courage seems therefore rather different to ours.[2]

(B3) The information that courage is differently conceived by Aristotle than by the modern west, can be used in two different ways. One can use the Aristotelian conception to open up our own conception, see how they differ, ask what advantages the two conceptions have; or one can appreciate the difference as a cultural anthropologist, and perhaps relate the Aristotelian conception to various Athenian institutions. Other virtues in Ar's list will also be of interest to this anthropologist. Take pride, or magnanimity. The proud man has a definite style, reflected in both his walking and the way he speaks (remember this is a virtue): "A slow step is thought proper to the proud man, a deep voice, and a level utterance; for the man who takes few things seriously is not likely to be hurried, nor the man who thinks nothing [to be] great to be excited, while a shrill voice and a rapid gait are the results of hurry and excitement" (IV.3). This man might seem to us pretentious, tedious or snobbish, particularly when we learn that he is (quote) "given to telling the truth, except when he speaks in irony to the vulgar" (IV.3). But, Ar's description also matches almost word for word that which Plutarch records for us of Pericles (which can be found in Davies 102): [Pericles] "derived not only a dignity of spirit and a nobility of utterance which was entirely free from the vulgar and unscrupulous buffooneries of mob oratory, but also a composure of countenance that never dissolved into laughter, a serenity in his movements and in the graceful arrangement of his dress which nothing could distrub when he was speaking, a firm and evenly modulated voice, and other characteristics of the same kind which deeply impressed his audience" (Plut. Per. 5.1).

(4) Two more of Ar's virtues seem hard to think of as virtues, in that they apply only to the rich and powerful: magnificence, and the virtue connected to large honors.[3]

It may seem that Ar is here drawing a distinction between virtues on morally questionable grounds. Surely the obligations of liberality fall equally on rich and poor alike, in due proportion. The sort of obligation does not change according to the size of the bank balance, only the actual amount given away. But in fact, this seems to accord with what Ar says. He does not demand substantially different behavior from a man who wishes to be magnificent; and in fact insists that he be liberal. Rather, he just expects that his expenditures, which most often concern the city, be magnificent and not cut corners; the liberal man, on the other hand, is sometimes constrained by his circumstances to give slighlty unimpressive Christmas presents.

Magnificence is thus rather just a special case of liberality, not a separate virtue. There is no evidence here of a two-tier virtue system in which the poor are not held to the same account as the rich. (I think one can make a compelling case that certain 'virtues' and norms of behavior were adopted by the aristocratic class and expected only of them, but this is not supported by Aristotle's Ethics.)

Before we leave magnificence, I should note that it too gives a nice picture of Ar's context. The magnificent man is clearly a wealthy Athenian who has to spend money on liturgies; Ar's examples are paying for triremes, sacred embassies, choruses, etc. Aristotle himself was not Athenian, having been born in Chalcidice in the NW Aegean, but he did spend considerable portions of his life, living as a metic in Athens. The NE probably belongs to his second period, the period after he had tutored the young Alexander, and during which he ran his school, known as the Lyceum or Peripatos (his followers were thus called Peripatetics). His audience in the NE is clearly the sort of young men that we have seen Soc in company with, adolescents from wealthy families with aspirations to being important in Athens.

(B5) The context of the Ethics is again clear in the virtue of ready wit, though here we are concerned less with public benefactions than private dinner parties. Being a good dinner companion would probably not make our top ten list of virtues -- amusing anecdotes and dinner chat were not high priorities for the Christian saints -- but we do think of it as a social grace. It fits better in an arete defined simply as excellence.

More importantly, however, this triad of wit, boorishness and buffoonery, raises a deeper question for Ar's scheme. Is there really an emotion attached to this triad at all? When Ar describes it, he does not really offer one, but even if he did, would it be helpful to look at this triad through the lense of what emotion it is related to, or rather that of some other organizing concept such as taste? Ready wit would seem to me to be less a function of right desire than of right judgment, and this conclusion is a much deeper challenge to one of Ar's central contentions, namely that every excellence of character involves the expression of some particular emotion.

(C) Some conclusions

We can draw on the Ethics in two ways. First we can use it as a source for the cultural history of 4thC Athens. Aristotle tells us that he draws on communal wisdom, and we can assume that much of what he considers virtuous or excellent was considered so, at least by the aristocratic layer of Athenian society. His Ethics offers us a list of virtues, some of which we recognize at once, some of which seem to belong to some discipline concerned with human behavior other than ethics. As such we can use this list to see whether and how the concept of arete has developed from that in Homer, to that of the Periclean period to that of the 4thC.

But the Ethics also raises interesting questions for the moral philosopher, questions about what shape an ethics should take and what method an ethical inquiry should adopt.

(C1) First, in II-V, Ar seems to justify his ethical system by appeal to received opinion. Although, as we saw at the start, arete is introduced as a logical concept that fulfilled a particular role in the proposition "happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with perfect virtue," Ar does not, in these books, seek to discover what virtue is by asking what activities make us happy, and what it takes to do them well. Rather he draws on the popular understanding of what arete, excellence or virtue, means. He thus does not create an ethical system by appeal to some independent justification, such as the benefit of the city, the wealth of an individual member, the health of every citizen's person, or the free distribution of information. Rather he attempts to find order in our disordered beliefs about ethics, and show from within the system what virtue is. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches?

(C2) Second, Ar's idea of moral excellence is very different from Ross'. For Ross virtue consists in self-control or continence, for Ar in not even needing to control oneself. This would seem to represent a central premise in both systems, and we might ask which has more value. Evelyn Waugh in Decline and Fall remarks that those who spent their youth in boarding schools do not find prisons to be depressing. Perhaps the same is true of monks and monasteries: what virtue is a monk exhibiting if he has already been habituated to asceticism and lacks any desire to over-indulge?

(C3) Third, Ar attaches at least one emotion to every virtue, thus marking the emotions as the site on which the battle for virtue will be waged. I have suggested that this does not work for all Ar's virtues (ready wit, for example); and you might think about whether it works for all the characteristics you see as virtuous. What about honesty or sincerity? What virtue is at issue there? Is there a desire to lie? Or what about justice? You might consider here Ar's complicated account of justice in V which I did not have time to include in this lecture.

(C4) Fourth, we can widen the scope of this question and ask whether, even if we can attach an emotion to a virtue, this is the best way to think about that virtue. I have suggested that courage may be better conceptualized in some other way.

(C5) Fifth, Ar sees every emotion as able to be ranged on a scale, able to be exhibited in defect, excess, or just right. Is this a good way to think about virtue? Two other ways to do so immediately present themselves. We could primarily think of specific actions as bad, rather than character states (as perhaps Anglo-American jurisprudence in general does); or we could think of evil as having many more than two forms, that one can err in a thousand different directions, not just in two.

In facing these questions, we have to ask, what is the end to which we are to refer arbitration between these various representations of virtue and vice? Or, good way to think about virtue for what? Mark McCullagh argues that the Ethics is primarily intended as a practical treatise, a handbook for moral education, aimed at teachers. First, Ar insists that it is through having a good character that we become good people; to be morally excellent is to "delight in and be pained by what we ought" (II.3). Second, he insists that habituation is the key to a good character, and that to become habitually good one must do the actions of a good man over and over until they become a part of your own character. (His system thus puts significantly less trust in the rational ability of his charges than Soc apparently did.) Unfortunately, as Ar readily admits (II.2), what a good man would do can only be described generally, and involves a complex appreciation of a situation. Nevertheless, Ar says, "we must give what help we can" (II.2). This help is the DOM.

The DOM is intended to help the educator educate. McCullagh argues that the educator is supposed to be a man of practical wisdom, someone well-versed in traditional ethical precepts; in many, if not most, situations he can judge right or wrong. What the DOM does for the teacher is less to tell him what is right or wrong than to give order to his precepts and show him how to effect a change in his pupil (or himself) so that he will become habituated to the good: [no.11]. That is, if he sees his student enjoying the pleasures of food a little too much he will direct him not to their proper enjoyment but to a position on the scale beyond proper enjoyment in order to habituate him against his excessive pleasure in touch. If he is too boorish at the symposium, he will encourage him to loosen up and act a little like a buffoon.

The value of the DOM should therefore be evaluated particularly in the context of the education of youths, and of Ar's general theory of the importance of character and habituation. The Ethics is not just aimed at giving some reason to one's already decent day-to-day conduct, but is also aimed at tuning a student's not so decent conduct. Aristotle feels like a student could be weened off sweet foods if he were forced into a rather sour Spartan diet. Yes, the Ethics is not intended to replace a moral sense, but it is intended to supplement and fine-tune it. The DOM should therefore not seem vacuous, and, if and where it seems to miss the point of morality or to describe a foreign system of ethics, it should sharpen our appreciation of the shape and point of our own system of ethics.[4]

²A second problem with this triad is what role confidence plays in relation to fear in this triad, and indeed what exactly confidence represents. Ar explicitly tells us in II.7 that excessive fearlessness is not equivalent to excessive confidence; but what then is the difference? What does confidence involve? Why is one virtue, courage, allied to two different areas, fear and confidence?

³These virtues are still organized, according to Ar's scheme, around an emotion which can be exhibited to excess, to defect, or in just the right way.

⁴Not only the DOM, but also Ar's idea of virtue. Consider a youth prone to bad actions. As we think about his future, it surely makes more sense to train him out of these desires than to train him to control them.